2008-12-29

Would you believe that at noon today, the Anthony Henday only got 27 seconds of green light at the Lessard Road intersection.

That is completely unacceptable. That the Freeway that is supposed to be Highway 216 has lights is already atrocious, but that you have less than 30 seconds to clear it before it turns red again is just inexcusable.

Drive down 104th avenue at 109th street, and I'll bet you those lights are more than 30 seconds in duration. I know the dumb way they built the southwest Henday (ie. no P3s) guarantees we'll have lights there until 2018 or some ridiculous date, but surely they can make Lessard traffic wait at that light for at least a minute or two!

You might think this list somewhat... odd. The first thing you might observe is that I'm certainly not going to win a lot of supporters if I was the one making this move. There would be a lot of anger, violent mobs, big protests, etc. etc. etc.

And thus the beauty of it. As perturbed crowds raised more and more hell over the move, Prime Minister Harper has a quick and easy comeback.If you had wanted a different Senator to represent you, you should have voted for them.

2008-12-18

You all remember the tales of Chang, Martok, and Kang, my three friends acquaintences in the hockey pool my buddy runs. Well, Martok is an actual friend, the other two by relation. Anyways, there's another infamous baseball/hockey pooler in the group (we shall dub Kruge) who is most famous for being a thirty year old queer pedophile virgin. At least one of these attributes is accurate, we may have made the other ones up. I forget which one it is. Anyways, this video is for him (not the least of which because the green-hat-wearing guy in the backseat is an awfully accurate resemblance:

Easy mother-#$*^&*@ing E:

That song by Kings of Leon that gets mega-overplayed on Sonic:

Peter Frampton asking if we feel like he does in 1976. Jeff Burges (sp?) on K97's "Legends of Classic Rock" segment mention his use of that weird talkbox gizmo:

The classic "Doctor McCoy" by sci-fi themed 90s pop band S.P.O.C.K.:S.P.O.C.K. - Dr McCoy
Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" as done by anthromorphic raisins. We think some people in the 1980s were high on drugs, odd as it may seem:
Depeche Mode did a cover of the classic Nat King Cole song that was a major blues/swing song for many years. About the same time, Route 66 itself was removed from the roster of highways. This can't be a coincidence:
What's more disturbing than German techno? German techno and naked puppets:

2008-12-15

It doesn't happen all that much, but I have a beef with something from Mark Steyn's award-winning America Alone:

I haven't really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, Gen. Kitchener's victory over the Mahdi at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. But a recent story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. Last month mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. A man from West Africa came into the shop and "shook the store owner's hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body."

I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after shaking hands with Sen. Clinton. Anyway, as Al-Quds reported, "The store owner became hysterical, and was taken to the hospital." The country's "Chief Criminal Attorney General" Yasser Ahmad Muhammad told the Sudanese daily Al-Rai Al-A'am that "the rumor broke out when one merchant went to another merchant to buy some Karkady [a Sudanese beverage]. Suddenly, the seller felt his penis shriveling."

The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, in its exhaustive coverage, noted that the penises of Khartoum were vulnerable not merely to handshaking. "Another victim, who refused to give his name, said that while he was at the market, a man approached him, gave him a comb, and asked him to comb his hair. When he did so, within seconds, he said, he felt a strange sensation and discovered that he had lost his penis."

Tales of the vanishing penises ran rampant round the city, spread by cell phones and text messages. Sudan's Attorney General Salah Abu Zayed declared that all complaints about the missing penises would be brought before a special investigative committee, though doctors had determined that the first plaintiff was "perfectly healthy." The health minister, Ahmad Bilal Othman, said that the epidemic was "scientifically groundless," and that it was "sorcery, magic, or an emotional problem."

...

But here's the telling detail: the vanishing-penis hysteria was spread by cell phones and text messaging. Think about that: you can own a cell phone, yet still believe that foreigners are able with a mere handshake to cause your penis to melt away. That's a state-of-the-art primitive.

Now one has to admit that this is a pretty damning assault on the people who follow the Islamic faith: it ties nicely in with Steyn's thesis about their cherry picking of western advances: Boeing 747 passenger jets they accept, suitcase nukes they accept, the AK-47 they accept, but individual liberty and women drivers they cannot abide. While I am of course a fan of individual liberty, I don't know if the free will of man can be extended to the questionable will of the woman.

You see, today I was reading America Alone while I waited for the evening coffee to brew, and something about this struck me. I've seen this before. I don't mean the vanishing penis thing, I mean the irrational beliefs of people who own cell phones and computers and can live in the modern world yet be so ignorant of it. I mean, look at this:

The contents of this e-mail are confidential to the ordinary user of the e-mail address to which it was addressed and may also beprivileged. If you are not the addressee of this e-mail you may not copy, forward, disclose or otherwise use it or any part of it in anyform whatsoever. If you have received this e-mail in error please e-mail the sender by replying to this message.

Doesn't this seem just as irrational and stupid as the penis-melters? The women I know send me at least 5 emails like this a month. (Note: about twenty-five additional header blocks were deleted by me: the bandwidth waste here must have been horrendous). And as for cell phones, four different women sent me 15 forwards in the past month, and here's a sample one:

Read this message do not delete it or ignore it. One day a girl was dreaming about the perfect guy and she received this mesage. She read it a few times and sent it to all her friends. The next day at the mall she saw her dream guy. He walked up to her and they became best friends and eventually went out and were married years later. A boy was texting his girlfriend when he received this message. He read it and laughed and deleted it, thinking his life couldn't get any better. Then two days later wen he was supposed to go out wit his girl she never showed up and as he was driving he heard on the radio his girlfriend had been in a car accident and died. He also lost his mother and best friend. He decided to find the message and he sent it. he found out his girlfriend and best friend were not dead. Just in a coma. His mom did not survive. If you care about the people around you, YOU Will send this to ten people before midnight and sumthing will make you very happ!y.

Women are stupid enough to actually believe this garbage. I can't tell you how many of these text messages and emails and Yahoo/MSN instant messages I've replied to by explaining they are total fakes: how can you believe that if you sent an IM forward to everybody on your contact list your contact list will glow with special colours to tell you who has a crush on you. In almost every case, the increasingly-defensive woman claims that "well, I thought it was worth a try".

2008-12-07

Generally I wouldn't say that, but with Taiwan's second player in the majors, I would have to disagree. The routine doesn't work with one: Scully's getting up there, but I doubt he could confuse himself.

This is Nyjer Morgan. He still has the puck he scored his first WHL goal with, one of two goals he scored in 1999-2000 with the Regina Pats. He played only 7 games, but managed 20 penalty minutes. He played with current NHLer Derek Boogaard (who had 17 PIMs in 5 games).

Anyways, according to an old Dodgers broadcast I was re-watching this morning, Morgan started playing hockey because it was his passion. Morgan's a black kid from San Fransisco: the only thing less likely than a black man from California being passionate about hockey is a black man from California voting against Proposition 8. (insert rim shot here. pun intended).

"Most definitely my best asset is my speed. I was blessed with natural speed. I never ran track before, none of that stuff, I've just got it in my genes, I guess," said Morgan, whose first name is pronounced as NIGH-jer. "It was my biggest asset in hockey, too."

After hockey, Nyjer went to Walla Walla College, and in 2002 was drafted in the 33rd round (!!) by the Pirates, where he has been since (in the system that is: he spent most of 2008 in the AAA Indians farm club).

Well, the big rally was yesterday. I didn't go, and the fact that right-wingers aren't really the rallying type will keep the turnout "artificially" low as it was.

My mother was planning to attend the rally, but decided that the icy roads and downtown parking difficulties made it not worth going. My friend from northeast Alberta was going to come, but her computer was having difficulty so she had her boyfriend come fix it before he went back to Fort Mac. A coworker who lives mere blocks from Linda Duncan's downtown office decided going to the new Leg grounds location was too far of a walk. Another friend decided to help his young son practice playing hockey rather than rally, etc. etc.

Meanwhile every remotely pro-coalition person I know skipped their union job to go (or didn't have anything to do as UofA classes ended the previous day). When all is said and done, angry marches on the steps of the building who's top dog vigorously opposes the coalition as well were secondary to family, personal well being, and time with friends. Besides, Parliament got prorogued by "Harper the Pro Roguer", so those who don't want to spend Christmas saying a prayer for "the well being of Prime Minister Dion" got their wish.

Ironically, the preceding comment by Kathy Shaidle was how these rallies were just dry outdoor pickup bars -- hence their appeal to University leftists. The irony is that that the reason I didn't attend the rally (either: I was considering crashing the pro rally last night) was because I was spending the day with a pretty girl.

2008-12-02

In the span of 72 hours, Canada has suddenly found itself no longer in the grip of an economic crisis (the Bank of Canada having refused to play the game Jack Layton had intended them to play when the 3rd quarter report showed our economy doing that... what's it called? oh, growing), so instead the Liberals and NDP were quick to create a constitutional crisis†.

Understand that by the time BlogRolling and Technoratti add this post to their feeds, this might all be old news, but here's my thoughts on the on-going issue as is.

First, as everybody and their dog now knows, this is because of Harper's threat to cut the $1.95 funding to all political parties: his party would lose more cash, but everybody else would lose all their budgets. Of particular risk is the BQ, who is forced to fundraise in Quebec where there is no longer anybody left with money: all chased away by the very political battles that the BQ was created to fight, ironically enough.

Secondly, as a friend indicated today, Harper should have known what happens when you put a desperate hungry animal into a "fight or flight" position: they do something desperate and hungry. Make no mistake about it, this is a really really really dumb thing for them to do.

Am I sure about that? Yes, let's do a quick check of the fundamentals:

This is a minority government, the third consecutive in tightly fought elections.

In politics there is a simple rule about any action your government or opposition wishes to take: either your plan has to bring in more new voters than the number of old voters you lose, or else you had such a glut of old voters you could afford to lose them.

The Liberals particularly are not in this second camp. The coalition as a whole is even moreso not able to chose the latter option. Votes are tight, because this is a minority government.

We must accept that there is some percentage of Liberal voters, lets denote it x, who will not be happy with the current course of action and will not be voting Liberal in the next election. x might be 0%, which I doubt. It might be 10%, or even 15-20%, we can argue about its size all we like, but that number exists.

Now bear in mind there is also some percentage, which we shall call y, of voters who voted NDP on October 14th and will no longer vote for the NDP in the next election because of this stunt. I suspect its larger than x but no guarantee of this fact will be necessary for the calculation to follow.

Let us suppose, with good reason, that the people who will not vote for the Liberals because of this will not vote for the NDP as they have made themselves peas in a pod. We can assume the reverse is true for the NDP voters. They are highly unlikely to oppose this action by "their" party and then approve it in the next. Remember that just six weeks ago, a potential Liberal voter chose the NDP because he didn't want the Liberals in power (or opposition). A potential NDP voter chose the Liberals because there was something about Layton or his party that he didn't like.

Now with this in mind, the coalition as a whole (I am ignoring the Bloc and making this English-provinces only calculation for semi-obvious reasons) stands to lose x + y votes in the next election. Again, we don't know how many voters this number represents, but it does represent a proportion. The end question has to be, as mentioned above, how many new votes for the coalition do Dion and Layton expect to get? For the electoral calculus on this move to make sense, they have to get a number greater than x+y to decide to switch to either of their parties. The problem is that this just isn't going to happen! Conservative supporters (even tenuous ones) aren't going to support one of the two parties they just finished voting against! They might siphon a few Green voters (more on this later), but I thought the whole deal with the Greens is that their voters weren't voting for political expediency and therefore won't be strategically switching votes. Did the LibDips expect that they were going to get a lot of undecided voters? Even the earliest reaction to their plan indicated that such a scenario wasn't about to happen. Maybe a few months into the mandate it might have worked, but not now before Harper has really even done anything.

In the end what we are looking at is a situation where the LibDips are guaranteed to lose votes at the next election. The NDP was a bit of a rising star, so I'm perplexed that Taliban Jack was so desperate to keep Harper out of power. Harper's tenure as PM is the reason that the NDP got such a strong showing, with all the nation's good progressives mobilized to help Jack keep Stephen "W." Harper in check. Now he's got a situation where a group of his supporters will go away in some nonzero number, and nowhere to bring new ones in since he allied with the Liberals.

I hear Liz May has endorsed the coalition. Is she on airplane glue too? Did Parliament Hill's plumbing systemtake the plume part too seriously? Opposing this coalition by saying that its too close to the election and that disrupting Parliament over this silly issue is too crass and politically opportunistic (despite her belief Harper is a bad but democratically elected leader) is her best chance to increase the stature for her own party. Remember that x+y block of voters? Well I guess they have no reason to angrily defect to the Greens, do they? Looks like they will be staying home.

RallyForCanada.ca is a new website planning a massive rally against the Coalition power-grab on Saturday. In Edmonton it will punk Linda Duncan's office: exactly what I've been wanting to do since October 15th! (I myself will likely not go, as I'm too Albertan to 'rally for Canada') Meanwhile the NDPers are planning a protest [leftists? protesting? You could knock me over with a feather right now! -ed] Saturday evening at Winston Churchill Square. With the pro-Harper rally at noon, and the anti-Harper rally at 6pm, the former could decide to go march against the latter. It's official: we've become Thailand.

Western alienation cannot be underestimated at this point: callers to Rutherford were outraged earlier today. Approximately 20% of my own company's workforce is planning to be at that Saturday rally, and half of them spent more time today asking me about Albertan Independence than actually working (sorry boss!) The same guys who just weeks earlier were asking if I felt like a traitor to Canada for my beliefs were today hoping that Ed Stelmach cut off the oil pipes back east and declared Alberta to be a separate entity by lunchtime tomorrow. Tying back to the x+y bit, it sure doesn't seem like the "coup" is engendering a lot of support. Except the hardcore partisans, who would declare Bush "greatest President ever" if Jack Layton took him on as a senior advisor.

To reiterate: The coup is opposed by huge numbers of Canadians, including NDP and Liberal voters. The coup is supported only by NDP and Liberal voters. As somebody at the National Post said, this arrangement gives the keys to 24 Sussex to Stephane Dion for a single Christmas. Besides that short-term benefit to the party, and the long-term detriment to the country, what on earth is gained? This is a dumb move, and hopefully by December 8th even the Liberals and Dippers have figured this out.† Okay technically its a constitutional convention crisis, as the actual Constitution Act doesn't bother to mention what to do when the Prime Minister loses the support of the House: partly because it doesn't mention the phrase "Prime Minister" at all.